Freud and dysfunction in U.S.-China relations

John Krich, WORLD VISION

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, May 18, 1999

1999-05-18 04:00:00 PDT CHINA; UNITED STATES -- HISTORY IS one big Freudian slip.

Like guilty guests at a party they never wanted to attend, nervous about making some dreadful faux pas, NATO's in-denial destroyers have just slapped the worst possible guest right in the face. The recent bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade emphatically proves Freud's main point. Concerning the psychopathology of daily life (and nightly missile launches), there are no such things as "accidents" - not even when you call them

"collateral damage."

Nor has the response in China been any less irrational or id-ridden. For anyone who has spent time in Beijing, the U.S. Embassy was the one place that nearly every citizen was dreaming and dying to get into.

Hopeless schemes to find corrupt back-door access to U.S. officials were matched by long lines of those waiting to pass through the front portals of a Marine guard station. Everybody was practicing English to talk his or her way into an entry visa for the bountiful possibilities of

"the beautiful country" (as the Mandarin word for America translates).

Perhaps not so coincidentally, the daily tumult of petitioners was amplified by the nearby circus of haggling along the narrow arcade of black-market exchangers and free-market traders in garments of dubious origins known as Silk Alley in summer and Down Alley in winter.

Set at the edge of Sanlitun, a park-like setting for many nations' diplomatic "foreign friends," eerily secured by People's Liberation Army sentries as unmoving through the night as the rows of weeping willows, the embassy seemed more beachhead than mere building. Not only did the compound house the occasional dissident, but it arranged visits to China for numerous scholars and symphonies.

Fourth of July picnics on its grounds gave invited Chinese their first taste of barbecue, rock music, free T-shirts and plenty of straw-hatted, red-white-and-blue hoopla.

Even when sponsored by M&M's, that most ubiquitous of U.S. brand names, the embassy's activities seemed about as benign and well-meaning as any spy-ridden Yankee outpost possibly could be.

So it now seems utterly surreal to view televised images of the generation most affected by contact with the West, wearing Nike T-shirts and Calvin Klein fashions, heaving rocks and epithets full of hatred - while those same stoic PLA sentries, finally summoned to real action, follow orders from higher-ups to guard nothing.

In this "Beijing Spring," 10 years after the repression in Tiananmen Square, the government and people stand as one in response to a national affront. Instead of building their imitation Goddess of Democracy, China's best and brightest busily tear down statuettes of Colonel Sanders.

And while one can hardly blame them for wanting to protect the world's most complex cuisine from the corruptions of fast food, it does not seem reasonable to blame the entire spiritual malaise of a country gone mad with materialism on the miscalculations of bombing squadrons over Yugoslavia. Nobody needs a bungling CIA to remind that global capitalism leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to making people feel respected or fulfilled.

But China's crisis is not so much political. Rather than a matter of musical chairs among party chairmen scrambling to abandon rice-bowl socialism, it's a matter of identity. The culture as a whole cannot return to a discredited, obsolete past. But neither can it find satisfaction in slavish imitation of Western models.

The Chinese will need far more than 10 straight years of 10 percent growth in the GNP to figure out some comfortable contemporary definition of Chinese values and beliefs.

Still, while doing much to line their pockets, U.S. interests have done little to help them. Instead of patience and understanding, a large sector of American political leadership hopes to profit from the demagogic demonization of a huge, half-feudal land still struggling to feed its population.

For most Americans, China exists only as some dull, distant mirror. When we accuse the Chinese of being greedy, grasping, scheming and expansionist, we are unconsciously indicting ourselves. It's called projection, as Freud might tell us, were he still around.

The good shrink from Vienna surely would have a field day with this dysfunctional relationship, driven by envy and dependence on one side, on the other by the need to control and a raging fear of the unknown. Objectively, there are no two nations on Earth that have more to gain, economically, culturally and spiritually, through becoming friends, even intimate partners. But intimacy is forged through equality and mutual respect.

Once more, through an incident sparked by a seemingly random involvement, we've come to see U.S.-China relations as an abusive marriage, in which love can be expressed only through blows and a little blood, the most convincing testament of how much both peoples need one another.

This column would be remiss without noting last week's long-overdue visit to the Bay Area by 74-year-old Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a cranky, chain-smoking, story teller who undoubtedly would have preferred not to have become the living conscience of Indonesia.

At last freed from house arrest, Pram, the name his countrymen know him by, asked repeatedly that any secret police attending his appearances note his remarks properly. Nothing he could say in person can match the statement available to all readers through "This Earth of Mankind," first volume of Pramoedya's Buru Quartet, an epic of the 20th century's struggle to break with traditionalism while asserting national identity, told with the omnipotent style of a 19th century novelist, made more remarkable by having first been recited orally to fellow political prisoners, later typed and smuggled out of an Indonesian dungeon one page at a time.&lt;